Capturing Conflict Is What She Does

In It’s What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War, photojournalist Lynsey Addario describes photographing the Afghan people before and after the Taliban reign, the civilian casualties and misunderstood insurgents of the Iraq War, the burned villages and countless dead in Darfur, and violence against women in the Congo, as well as her own kidnapping by pro-Qaddafi forces in the Libyan civil war.

(Lynsey Addario for The New York Times)

A soldier with the opposition weeps outside of the hospital in Ras Lanuf as soldiers are being brought in wounded and dead from the frontline west of Ras Lanuf during heavy fighting between troops loyal to Qaddafi in Ras Lanuf, in Eastern Libya, March 9, 2011. Dangerous confrontations have been going on between opposition forces and those loyal to Col. Qaddafi across Libya. 

(Lynsey Addario)

Soldiers with the 173rd battle company, on a battalion-wide mission in the Korengal valley in the village of Yakachina. Captain Dan Kearney watches his troops and controls close air support fire from above the village with a group of his soldiers.

(Lynsey Addario)

Kurdish Peshmerga soldiers deface a poster of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussain's poster in the Kirkuk Governate building in Kirkuk hours after it fell from Iraq Central Government rule, April 10, 2003.  Roughly twenty days after the start of the US-lead war on the regime of former Iraq leader Saddam Hussain, cities are falling out of his control, and locals celebrate and destroy statues and symbols of Hussains power.

(Lynsey Addario/ VII Network)

A Somali doctor checks for a heartbeat as Abbas Nishe, 1.5 years, struggles to fight severe malnutrition in the Benadir Hospital in Mogadishu, Somalia, August 25, 2011.  The hospital is overflowing with people sleeping on the floors throughout most wards. Thousands of Somalis have traveled to neighboring countries and to the capital city of Mogadishu to escape extreme drought conditions in their villages--an estimated 1.7 million people have become drought displaced, according to an UNOCHA report. The horn of Africa is suffering one of the worst droughts in years, displacing thousands, and killing others through severe malnutrition, measles, and diarrhea.

(Lynsey Addario for The New York Times)

Thousands of IDPs from Swat live fights for food in a temporary camp in Jalala, outside of Marden, in the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan, May 9, 2009.  Since the Pakistani government launched a military and bombing offensive against the Taliban around Swat and the tribal areas, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees estimates that 1.2 million people have already fled their homes, and another few hundred thousand are expected.